Monday, June 24, 2013

NSA hacking Chinese: it's self defense

One of Edward Snowden's revelations is that the NSA has been hacking China, such as hacking into 63 computers at Tsinghua University. This is probably true, but it's self-defense. Many of the hacks coming from China over the last decade have been coming from Chinese Universities. In fact, the Chinese hackers have been brazen about it, making little attempt to hide what they are doing, where they are coming from, or where the hacked information is ending up. Tsinghua University has been a major source of hacking against the United States for over a decade.

It's indeed Tsinghua that I was obliquely referring to in this post last March, where I say:

From the top, China sets goals. It may decide that in the next 10 years it wants to become the leading supplier of turbine engines. It then figures out what it needs in order to accomplish that goal. It’ll need a supply of titanium from Russia. It’ll need to setup factories in Guangdong. It’ll need to greatly expand it’s training of turbine engineers coming from technical universities.

What if you are a Chinese aeronautics professor tasked with expanding the turbine engine program at your university? How do you teach your students the latest cutting edge technology? Well, you go read papers on the subject published in the United States. You then grab the author’s email addresses. You send them e-mails saying “I enjoyed your talk at Xyz Conference. I was wondering if you had any comments on this paper I’m writing”. You attach a PDF document with an exploit (written by a student in CompSci). The recipient downloads it, gets pwned, and has all their research stolen, including the latest stuff funded by Lockheed.

How can you independently verify my claims? I'm not sure. I've gotten this from casual private conversations for over a decade. That's the problem with this whole NSA thing: it's over-classified, so it's hard to distinguish rumor from fact. At least in several cases, I've interviewed people with first hand experience, so I know some of it it true. On the other hand, I don't have anything close to the entire picture.

My point is this: Tsinghua University hacks the United States. It's not unreasonable to expect for the United States to hack back.

4 comments:

I suspect the US would have been hacking the university even if China's hackers weren't hacking the US.

The converse may also be true.

However, it is the United States which has an official policy that it is to be the sole superpower on the planet and that no even REGIONAL power be allowed to exist. (Look it up.) This means that China has to be put down, as well as Iran in the Middle East.

In my view, Chinese hacking of US intellectual property is two things: 1) leveling the playing field, and 2) payback for the British opium invasion.

I further believe that "intellectual property" is an oxymoron. So I really don't care a whit if some Chinese company sucks IP out of a US company. Let the US company compete on performance, not secrets.

T. H. White once said that if the European can't compete with Asia because Asia runs on coolies, then the European should move to Asia and learn to live on a bowl of rice.

All the China bashing is essentially a racist intention to keep the Third World where it is - no economic threat to the wealth of the West - by military force if necessary.

This is precisely why we're going to be attacking Syria - so we can attack Iran later - because Iran isn't going along with the program unlike the corrupt monarchies the US supports.

It's hypocrisy, the lot of it. Saying that the US wouldn't be hacking China unless China was hacking the US is picking a selective point in history without justification.

Both industrial and militairy espionage was issued by the US to spy on enemy and allied countries and to guard the world in general since decades. I can only say it would be foolish not to hack into these Chinese systems, because being unprepared would be wrong. But claiming that "they started it" is just an excuse to help people sleep at night.